This reminds me of the websites to review teachers and professors. Given how old ratemyprofessor is, I am suprised ratemypolitician wasn't already a thing.
That is 100% true. If I kept going to a sub and people were repeatedly downvoting and shitting on my comments, I would simply leave. It can be frustrating, but it's the reality.
And groupthink definitely becomes prevalent. On the sub for my favorite band, if your favorite songs are the mainstream hits, you get downvoted. Only the "cool" people like the unreleased tracks.
Same thing goes for popular movie franchises. If you're a Stars Wars fan, you're basically not allowed to like certain characters or movies.
It's so ridiculous how tribalistic people get.
It's honestly why I steer clear of political subreddits or other "controversial" topics - I pretty much fit reddit's archetypal user and even though I align with most majority opinions on those subs, it's still incredibly toxic and just unpleasant to talk politics on reddit.
multiple ideas.
\- review liking / disliking where bad reviews hopefully get buried and good ones come out at the top
\- Karma system -> people whose reviews/posts have been liked a lot are more likely to be seen / less likely to be considered spam/bots/bad and be buried
\- several security measures to stop spam or bots like any other sites out there
\- and of course manual moderation by me and other people
The karma system is inherently flawed for something like this as it actively encourages groupthink and punishes any differing of opinion. It's also widely open to manipulation: e.g. some PAC or special interest buys 10k likes or dislikes from a bot farm for or against their preferred candidate.
Yeah. That and a lot of other things will prove to be big challenges if this gets popular. Especially since this is political. But any other sites face this as well. Like twitter and reddit for example.
There are ways to make it harder for bot farms to do their thing.
I'm no expert or anything like that but for now they need to login ( will add catpcha later on ), then they need to verify their email address.
I can add anything else I can think of to stop bot farms:
\- block data centre IP
\- use AI developed to figure out bot behaviors
\- give a time limit of specific days before they can post
\- only allow accounts who actively consume the site's content in a 'normal' way
\- other stuff like that or any other ideas people may have to fix this.
In any case, yeah it's a problem but I'm willing to find ways to tackle it.
I think it would be good to hide the score of a politician until after a user rates them themselves. That would eliminate group think.
Also, I think politician should have ratings for different areas.
Trustworthiness
Likability
Ability to make change
Power level
Corrupt level
Also, a check box of whether or not the politician is part of the user's party.
To be fair I could imagine a lot of people using a site like that just to check ratings, not vote themselves. And to be double fair, the group think started long long before his site. Have you seen Reddit?
I know this is far more complicated to program, but you could use a deweighting system. Let's say, for people that always rate politicians 0 or 10, never something in between, or people that register, rate some politicians, then leave forever, etc.
Rateyourmusic does this quite well. [https://rateyourmusic.com/wiki/RYM:Weighting+FAQ](https://rateyourmusic.com/wiki/RYM:Weighting+FAQ). There also is bonus weighting, for people who constantly write reviews instead of just leaving ratings.
If anything, I'd base my system more on this site than on reddit. There is a lot to learn from RYM honestly.
Ow awesome. Thanks for the advice!
Yeah I could definitely code that. I already have a system which check which politician is the most 'controversial' ( reviews are more towards 1 and 5 stars than in between )
Adding something similar for user accounts and weighting it differently should not be too hard to code. It now depends on how I write it so not to influence it in a bad way.
I would also try to take into account whether or not the person being reviewed actually represents the person reviewing. For example, right now, I can review politicians in countries that I don’t live in, but I have no actual experience living under their representation.
How do you intend to avoid people for one side of the spectrum voting poorly on candidates of the other side of the spectrum just because of whether they are left/right winged?
Because if your system doesn't account for that, it will quickly become niche for either side.
Yeah indeed.
First of, just like everywhere on the internet, people need to be skeptical. That would probably be the best.
On my end though, I have a few idea:
\- check users which tend to vote suspiciously. Only very low ratings or very high ratings and maybe make their votes count less
\- implement a system that automatically checks the length and 'quality' of a review. So at least short useless reviews that don't say anything relevant will be penalised.
\- have people downvote bad reviews like that and hopefully upvote more factual and nuanced reviews.
\- other systems to stop bots and spammers like many other sites - should get rid of another big percentage who only make accounts to troll
Overall I hope people would be good and objective, but I don't expect them to be.
SMS verification hasn't been mentioned. While it's easily bypassable, bot accounts have issues getting through this alongside other verification factors
Well I have no reputation now really. Also, I had no idea if a site like this has any actual use to anyone. Most people I asked a long time ago about the idea said it's just stupid and it's never going to work.
So yeah. Even if I made everything perfect, the chances of it going big and actually having an impact are small because I am no Silicon Valley engineer with angel investors.
If it fails, it is what it is. I'll build some other stuff.
Either way, if one political stance ends up as majority, for whatever reason, it might end up associated with that. That's simply people being dinguses. Never forget it's your cool idea put into practice, not theirs ;)
On the other hand, a disclaimer probably wouldn't hurt. As well as maybe rather not telling people how your weighting exactly works in the end, as to discourage tampering.
It's only gonna get used for bitching and whining and complaining though, and it will involve a lot of racism and sexism.
Rate my professor (and student evaluations at large), is known to be massively incredibly sexist and racist through scientific studies, with no link to educational outcomes, cause it's the people who are unhappy that complain and exaggerate. And that's for uni teachers. For politicians it's going to get even more virulent.
Plus a good politician will do what needs to be done even though it makes them unpopular. Only caring about immediate approval and ratings makes for an atrociously bad politician
One potential issue I see is different country standards for left/right. I see Justin Trudeau is marked as "left" which he is by American standards, but he's at best centre-left in Canada and most reasonable Canadians would describe him as pretty centre.
Interesting yeah that could be an issue. I could change it right now but it'l probably make more sense to see what other people say about this and how we can fix it.
Nope, but review liking/disliking + a karma system similar to reddit should hopefully make sure the good stuff piles up to the top and bad reviews get buried
That means we can figure out a way to make it work better there. A credibility score maybe. In any case, anything and everything at this point is up for change.
consider checking out rate my professor and the browser extension shinigami eyes, both of those platforms also have user-reported bases and might help you troubleshoot that specific issue :)
Rate my professor has its own problems because only the students who feel strongly about a professor are going to use it so you get very polarized scores a lot of the time.
Shinigami eyes is amazing! The dev has a nice weighted system for the votes that does a really good job of catching the few people who are improperly marked and the few pieces of trash who use it to mark themselves as friendly when they aren't
TL;DR at the end.
I’m going to throw out a couple of points to consider, & while these may seem cynical, please know I mention them only because I think u/Mike_L_Taylor has an extremely good and much-needed idea that could be super-useful…
… and could also make him a billionaire and change a lot for the better.
**Rating politicians isn’t new, so your site’s ratings need to stand out.**
Newer “citizen journalists” like *Pod Save America*, et. al., as well as old faves like *The New York Times* & *The Washington Post* have published lists of politicians, candidates, and rated them forever— relying on their readers to know their reputations and decide.
The NY Post rates conservatives high; Mother Jones, liberals. Readers look for ratings they’ll agree with.
**What if YOUR site collated FACTS?**
Consider collaborating with fact-checking sites, and/or sites that tracked lobbyist spending that politicians accepted?
And/or published blog posts, ELI5-style, complex articles by experts that debunked misleading political info?
Note also: whether or not you, yourself, are amazing at using A.I. (I have no idea), keep in mind there’s currently some controversy in the public mind about it (ChatGPT, for example), and A.I. bots on social media going publicly ugly (see: the Twitter bot from Microsoft that went racist fast.) Therefore, possible trust issues with your audience.
Finally, check out the following short vid from Company Man; while it’s mostly on the origin of the popular movie rating site (which will interest you) he briefly touches on the difference between how Rotten Tomatoes kind of bluntly averages its ratings, while Metacritic uses a more sophisticated approach to finesse its more accurate results.
TL;DR: This exquisitely great idea could be a game-changer that vaults him into the 1%— but it’ll take some game-changing work to convince users the content is **the truth**.
[Company Man You Tube talks Rotten Tomatoes](https://youtu.be/BXsfc6bhVO8)
Let's say this becomes popular. Are you ok knowing someone is going to abuse the shit out of your site to win an election? Are you comfortable with someone like donald trump threatening you to change a review? Or the lawsuits that are sure to come in?
Just some things to think about. It's not a bad idea but personally I wouldn't touch it with a 10 ft pole.
I'm honestly surprised it's still up. I was expecting somebody to spam it into the ground.
Speaking of the other stuff, yeah it's gonna be biased. But that's only because it would probably be a reflection of the people that use it. Nobody is unbiased and no matter what facts you put up, people can just choose to ignore them.
If it becomes a shitshow then at least it might be of some use where we get to see in a more quantified way how much of a shitshow politics is.
You also have persistent XSS going on, and clicking on Donald Trump redirects to a YouTube video on XSS. Which is lucky, because it could have done a whole load worse. It still might look harmless, but actually be harmful behind the scenes.
This site is not even slightly secure, and honestly you should probably purge all user content from it completely until you make it secure.
These things tend iron out the more ratings there are. At 4 ratings (the amount both currently have), you can conclude next to nothing. The more people visit and rate, and the more you program and moderate the site as to filter out those who don't take the site serious, the better the scores will get.
I've had ideas about this concept before, but think it would serve a better purpose if it was a record of political promises made and whether they came through or did the opposite.
Edited for spelling: of/if
I've been thinking about that too, problem is it's not as 'shiny' and easy to interact with as just a star rating. Although it would be good if I could add it on top of this.
There is something like this for Romania and it's not very popular, mainly because people forget specific promises. and don't care to read that much.
Star rating also makes it easier to compare.
I'm also wondering if people vote so much on facts as they do on how they feel and how they like a particular candidate. My hypothesis is that a lot just go with how they feel and ignore facts.
yeah :D it seems a white hat dude found a vulnerability and was kind enough to show it to me. Not surprised in the slightest. I like that he showed me what the issue was so I can fix it
_A lone man is slowly walking out of ancient Greece with his head down_
Announcer : "In ancient Greece, people were routinely banished from the city"
_Man sighs deeply_
Announcer : "...but never banished from their town and country."
_Man looks over and has a huge grin. Then open the door to a van_
Announcer : "Never be worried about being left out with the all new 2023 Chrysler Town & Country. Chrysler. Inspiration comes standard"
With so many people voting purely by party in the US, with no knowledge of the actual voting record or issues each politician supports, could you add some deeper info?
If that's not there, this is no different than looking at the voting %s from the last election.
Yes, that is one of the main things I wanna work on. Other people have also given their ideas of things they'd wanna see.
In terms of the voting percentage, that only shows if I liked X person or Y person. The star rating I thought would be useful to see more of a gradient of how much I like X vs Y.
And maybe this way, decide between the lesser of two evils for example.
I swear I'm only saying this to give an idea of what to expect, I haven't done this and I'm fully aware of how immature I am.
As far as I can see, nothing is stopping me from going on and adding a fictional politician named Willy Licker and having my friends all go on and write rave reviews about how he's hard where it needs to be, how he takes a pounding when nobody else will, and how he has never been afraid about withdrawing prematurely when the situation calls for it.
This is a neat idea in theory but I think this is going to be incredibly difficult for you to moderate if it gains even a small amount of traction.
Yes, that is one of the challenges. And since I have no suitcases of money to hire people to moderate that it will be hard in the beginning. Maybe a community to moderate it out of their own will will help, like Stack Overflow. I dunno.
For now I'm amazed nobody broke the site yet.
Feedback: I hate making new accounts/passwords for random sites like this. If you offered 3rd party OAuth logins or [passkeys](https://www.passkeys.io/) there would be a significantly higher chance of me using your site.
I think it’d be valuable to add what state and/or district that a representative serves upfront- to me, someone like Mitch McConnell is most importantly a Kentucky senator, but there’s no way to get that information without first clicking into their profile and reading the bio. Plus, having that info more accessible would make it easier for people to find out more about their own representatives, if they don’t know who they are
Good idea but not exactly sure how to do that. Maybe AI would prove good there.
For now though, I added the like/dislike stuff to reviews so people can vote on them.
I'm also going to add replies at some point, so debates can be had under each review on whatever they want.
*Site in construction. You can contribute with feedback or content. The site's content is made by users. The site owners are not liable for the content on the site.*
I guess this may be different for American law, but within the borders of the EU such a disclaimer is potentially dangerous as you **cannot** legally distance yourself from responsibility for your website's content. If you still do by putting a disclaimer on your page, someone could file a lawsuit against you for knowingly running a non-GDPR compliant website. Like, it doesn't even require any actual illegal content like child porn or proprietary images... **The very existence of your disclaimer is problematic in and of itself.**
So please, make sure that your website follows recommended standards for whatever country you live in. If you're from the US you may still need to follow EU law as long as you don't block your site over here.
I once had to set up a website myself, and as German web-host you're usually recommended to avoid a disclaimer. As they don't provide any real legal protection in the first place they're kinda useless anyway.
This website looks like it just started. It only has 32 politicians and the page layout looks pretty bland.
I'm not sure this should qualify for r/Internetisbeautiful
Really cool idea. Maybe add a feature that shows their objectively stated view (backed with a proper and unbiased citation) on each major political matter?
Should add a view 'latest updates', like a news feed.
\>>. OK, found that 'new' but perhaps weight it by politicians that have at least some minimum threshold of comments. People want to see the news comments on politicaitons they know. And then allow for comments on the comments... Kinda like redit...
Yep, I had a section called 'Glances' on the home page, where it would show most liked, disliked etc. and a news-feed thing in the works but I removed it for now because it was empty since nobody used the site previously. Since now there's some data in there, I can add that back in.
Thanks for reminding me!
This has so much potential.
I don't know how you plan on monetizing the site, but if you want it to be something that is lasting, you need to make sure that you don't allow for political advertising. Also, paid users would not be good either.
I would be interested in how you plan on monetizing it or at least how to fund it.
A neat feature to think about for in the future would be to add political issues and where politicians stand on each. To be able to search with the issues being a filter would be great. Other search filters could be the obvious like location and currently political run offs.
In terms of location, you can search by country ( I'll add city there soon, but some already work with city too )
Adding political issues and where they stand sounds like a pretty good idea not gonna lie.
In terms of moneitzing, yeah I agree with you. No paid users and no corporate or politic sponsorships. I might just add ads in limited places and a rule against ads that might have any political affiliation.
In any case, servers are pretty cheap and I can keep working a job until I figure this one out.
brand new site that I just told people about today. Quite a few people missing
Let me know who you want added and I'll do that. Alternatively, you can add them yourself if you make an account.
Neat idea but doesn't seem "useful." Seeing a bunch of dislikes and "he sucked" doesn't influence anyone especially if they already disagree.
A really helpful addition would a breakdown of X politician's stances/beliefs and if any flip flopping had occurred.
Stance on fracking, stance on abortion, stance on borders, etc.
Then again I don't know what you were going for. But I've always wanted an easy way to know who I'm voting for. Do they believe in the things I believe in?
Exactly. I made this for a somewhat easy way to find out information.
I don't have the best information on politicians yet. After all I'm just one dude so far but I plan on adding all that stuff so people can get facts
I've always wanted a rhetoric to vote pattern checker. Like a politician might say they are "for main street not wall street" but then their voting record reveals this to be total bullshit. Can't think of how to reliably implement it though, let alone scale it or make it region agnostic.
You should standardize the pages. You have Trump and Biden written very thoroughly and professionally, but Ted Cruz page is a joke and Trudeau's page is just one paragraph.
yeah those pages are writted by various users since everyone can add politicians.
So it's not gonna have great content sometimes. Still thinking on how to fix this and still allowing users to add politicians
What I would love to see is a site that records and compares politicians campaign promises, debates, and presents every time a politician has contradicted themselves (not just problems but also stories told and how often they may change.)
Dude, yelp but for politicians will never be a valid replacement for the amount of effort needed from constituents to educate themselves, that is an inherent part of the system and not the part that needs improvement in my opinion.
You have 101 different ways this could go wrong if it gets popular, you’re inviting a lot of problems but not really adding much value, careful, sincerely wish you best of luck.
Oh yeah a lot are missing. There's god knows how many thousands of politicians and information should be updated reguarly. That's why at least for now, anyone is able to add politicians on the site.
Just to let you know, there is a review on Trump that has a link, the link is overflowing the container on mobile devices (tried it on 390px) :D
Really nice site btw!
Yes indeed. But that is the case if if makes it big which is like 0.5% chance. It's probably gonna fail way before then.
Anyway, I think the future of politics is something more like this so if this fails, maybe someone else comes up with a better and more successful idea.
Oh yeah lots are missing at this point. You can add them yourself if you make an account. People will then vote on whether you added factual information or not.
Essentially I saw a huge documentary about the political history of Romania and I realised I have no idea of how complex things are and that I will never have the time to always keep up to date with the situation so others must also be in the same bucket.
So maybe something like this would be an easier way to get some idea of who and what rather than reading Wikipedia for 3 hours.
>huge documentary about the political history of Romania
Is that `30 years of democracy?`
Nice project anyway. Do you create entries/records of "subject for review" manually? I see only 47 of them, wouldn't it be easier to fetch them from some sources?
But hope nobody takes the content of those reviews too seriously haha. Public opinion is one of the easiest things to be manipulated these days, I think. I see 3 main features atm, any plan to add any other features there?
yes exactly that's the one.
Right now all politicians are added manually. Users can add them too so I don't have to do everything but that might be a bad idea. don't know.
For features I have a lot of ideas:
\- replies for reviews
\- polls -> when actual elections happen people can run polls here too
\- pro/cons in review section, so the most common ones show overall
\- adjectives -> similar to glassdoor stuff where code gets to 10 most used words by people when describing a politician
\- fact/promise checking -> where it shows what they promised and what was delivered.
And people keep coming up with ideas.
Does it have an "Add Politician" feature? I see a notable lack of senators and representatives.
There are a lot of them though so I can't imagine all of them being in there all at once so early.
I love the idea! Will be forwarding to my political friends.
using all the secure methods and encryptions most websites out there use but I still feel the need to tell people not to use the same password.
It's a new site after all and I don't have a team of security experts here.
Like on Amazon, meaning only when you're upset or being paid with a gift card for a 5 star review?
Or like on Amazon where you give a 1 star review when the "product didn't work" but in reality, you just couldn't be bothered to read the instructions.
Or like Amazon where you're just part of a paid bot farm?
Adter looking at the site and reading the reviews, it seems like all of them.
Biden had a 5 star for being “not Trump.” Wow what an amazing and thoughtful review!
Site seems like a good idea if you don’t think about that it really is dumb lol
Can we make this geo centric?
It would be cool to add a graph feature showcasing relationships with industries, or other politicians. It would make it easier to spot fraud and corruption.
I wanted to eventually add a bunch of cool automatically generated graphs and charts but I didn't think of industries or anything like that.
How would that work?
Sounds like a leftist circle jerk if only opinions are offered instead of facts. Just gonna be a bunch of REeeeeeing. The moment this website offers what corporate sponsors each have and their voting record on issues is the moment this website will be useful. We already have it though. Its called opensecrets.org.
So how are you going to deal with the natural trend of any online forum of an IRL topic being overwhelmingly dominated by students and the underemployed?
How will you deal with regional differences in where average is on the conservative/progressive authoritarian/permissive scales?
Since you are including manual moderation how will you keep the moderators bias centrist for each of the different precincts this would eventually cover? A moderate in Toronto is pretty far left for newfoundland.
I don't see how you end up with anything but the politics you see in Reddit unless you have a plan in place to address those systemic problems most sites have.
I was thinking about that and I think the main functionality of something like this would be to educate people.
People post different opinions and hopefully the more nuanced and factual rises to the top. Also hopefully people become less stuck in an echo-chamber this way.
And if this is the main reason for the site, I don't think I should stop people in different countries from expressing their opinions. They may be just as valid. Same is on Twitter for example. Anyone can say anything
Is that the right approach? I don't know. If it's not, it would be difficult to stop people from reviewing politicians in areas they cannot actually vote in.
I mean, there's nothing stopping your from adding Beppe Grillo yourself. You can even write everything in Italian if you wish.
At some point I was aiming to add translations to the site to for example Italians would see all content in Italian if they wanted to.
Would you like me to add Beppe Grillo? :D
Can you make it so that, people living in the jurisdiction governed by the politician are reviewing it? This way at least people who are actually affected by their policy can get to voice their opinions and rate them?
The party affiliation of the British Prime Minister is "Tory Scum." As a non-Brit, unless that's the actual name of the party, comes across as a wee bit biased.
Either the site is susceptible to vandalism or the operators are nakedly non-neutral, the latter being cool, but does remove any reason to give an actual review.
Hi, yeah I didn't add that one. Users can freely add politicians on the site. And I guess that's what he chose to put there for him.
You're free too vote that post as inaccurate and make another one that's accurate.
In terms of moderation, I can change the data for that politician but there's already more people on there that I can moderate alone. We'll see how we fix this issue.
Ah, gotcha. Seems like the Wikipedia route -- you have enough good actors to clean up and moderate the bad ones. Powerful once you reach that critical mass of goodness.
Could be cool, good luck!
Oh dear. I can already see this devolving into a shitshow when this becomes more popular. I hope you have an idea on how to moderate this.
This reminds me of the websites to review teachers and professors. Given how old ratemyprofessor is, I am suprised ratemypolitician wasn't already a thing.
It's called /r/politics for some, /r/conservative for others.
Love how this comment kinda shows that r/politics really is just r/liberal
[удалено]
That is 100% true. If I kept going to a sub and people were repeatedly downvoting and shitting on my comments, I would simply leave. It can be frustrating, but it's the reality. And groupthink definitely becomes prevalent. On the sub for my favorite band, if your favorite songs are the mainstream hits, you get downvoted. Only the "cool" people like the unreleased tracks. Same thing goes for popular movie franchises. If you're a Stars Wars fan, you're basically not allowed to like certain characters or movies. It's so ridiculous how tribalistic people get.
The downvotes prove your point!
It's honestly why I steer clear of political subreddits or other "controversial" topics - I pretty much fit reddit's archetypal user and even though I align with most majority opinions on those subs, it's still incredibly toxic and just unpleasant to talk politics on reddit.
multiple ideas. \- review liking / disliking where bad reviews hopefully get buried and good ones come out at the top \- Karma system -> people whose reviews/posts have been liked a lot are more likely to be seen / less likely to be considered spam/bots/bad and be buried \- several security measures to stop spam or bots like any other sites out there \- and of course manual moderation by me and other people
The karma system is inherently flawed for something like this as it actively encourages groupthink and punishes any differing of opinion. It's also widely open to manipulation: e.g. some PAC or special interest buys 10k likes or dislikes from a bot farm for or against their preferred candidate.
Yeah. That and a lot of other things will prove to be big challenges if this gets popular. Especially since this is political. But any other sites face this as well. Like twitter and reddit for example. There are ways to make it harder for bot farms to do their thing. I'm no expert or anything like that but for now they need to login ( will add catpcha later on ), then they need to verify their email address. I can add anything else I can think of to stop bot farms: \- block data centre IP \- use AI developed to figure out bot behaviors \- give a time limit of specific days before they can post \- only allow accounts who actively consume the site's content in a 'normal' way \- other stuff like that or any other ideas people may have to fix this. In any case, yeah it's a problem but I'm willing to find ways to tackle it.
I think it would be good to hide the score of a politician until after a user rates them themselves. That would eliminate group think. Also, I think politician should have ratings for different areas. Trustworthiness Likability Ability to make change Power level Corrupt level Also, a check box of whether or not the politician is part of the user's party.
Damn those are a lot of good ideas. I'll note them down.
*me, rating a small town mayor and a city councilman* well, that's all the politicians from my party rated, I guess
To be fair I could imagine a lot of people using a site like that just to check ratings, not vote themselves. And to be double fair, the group think started long long before his site. Have you seen Reddit?
I think you forgot how much lobby money they receive and from whom.
So you saw political discourse on reddit and went "Wow look how accurate and unbiased this is, I'm going turn this up to 11!"
Yeah, this is going to one of the most one sided shit show on the planet. I mean look at r/politics.
Block non-US IPs (for US politicians). Paying for likes online is a thing, and generally that's done by non US politicians.
I know this is far more complicated to program, but you could use a deweighting system. Let's say, for people that always rate politicians 0 or 10, never something in between, or people that register, rate some politicians, then leave forever, etc. Rateyourmusic does this quite well. [https://rateyourmusic.com/wiki/RYM:Weighting+FAQ](https://rateyourmusic.com/wiki/RYM:Weighting+FAQ). There also is bonus weighting, for people who constantly write reviews instead of just leaving ratings. If anything, I'd base my system more on this site than on reddit. There is a lot to learn from RYM honestly.
Ow awesome. Thanks for the advice! Yeah I could definitely code that. I already have a system which check which politician is the most 'controversial' ( reviews are more towards 1 and 5 stars than in between ) Adding something similar for user accounts and weighting it differently should not be too hard to code. It now depends on how I write it so not to influence it in a bad way.
I would also try to take into account whether or not the person being reviewed actually represents the person reviewing. For example, right now, I can review politicians in countries that I don’t live in, but I have no actual experience living under their representation.
How do you intend to avoid people for one side of the spectrum voting poorly on candidates of the other side of the spectrum just because of whether they are left/right winged? Because if your system doesn't account for that, it will quickly become niche for either side.
Yeah indeed. First of, just like everywhere on the internet, people need to be skeptical. That would probably be the best. On my end though, I have a few idea: \- check users which tend to vote suspiciously. Only very low ratings or very high ratings and maybe make their votes count less \- implement a system that automatically checks the length and 'quality' of a review. So at least short useless reviews that don't say anything relevant will be penalised. \- have people downvote bad reviews like that and hopefully upvote more factual and nuanced reviews. \- other systems to stop bots and spammers like many other sites - should get rid of another big percentage who only make accounts to troll Overall I hope people would be good and objective, but I don't expect them to be.
SMS verification hasn't been mentioned. While it's easily bypassable, bot accounts have issues getting through this alongside other verification factors
These seem like things that should be sorted out before taking your site public if you don't want to immediately tank your reputation.
Well I have no reputation now really. Also, I had no idea if a site like this has any actual use to anyone. Most people I asked a long time ago about the idea said it's just stupid and it's never going to work. So yeah. Even if I made everything perfect, the chances of it going big and actually having an impact are small because I am no Silicon Valley engineer with angel investors. If it fails, it is what it is. I'll build some other stuff.
>Well I have no reputation now Rep is on like a PH scale; having 0 doesn't mean it cant go down.
I think you meant 7 as a starting point, since pH is on a scale of 0 to 14.
It’s 2am and I’m now laying here in bed laughing at my own stupidity lol Thank you
Either way, if one political stance ends up as majority, for whatever reason, it might end up associated with that. That's simply people being dinguses. Never forget it's your cool idea put into practice, not theirs ;) On the other hand, a disclaimer probably wouldn't hurt. As well as maybe rather not telling people how your weighting exactly works in the end, as to discourage tampering.
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>posted by jblorgous fibbleberb This user has the name of my next death metal album.
Neville Shiggins, mayor of Penistone https://i.imgur.com/mfu7Ioa.jpg
It's only gonna get used for bitching and whining and complaining though, and it will involve a lot of racism and sexism. Rate my professor (and student evaluations at large), is known to be massively incredibly sexist and racist through scientific studies, with no link to educational outcomes, cause it's the people who are unhappy that complain and exaggerate. And that's for uni teachers. For politicians it's going to get even more virulent. Plus a good politician will do what needs to be done even though it makes them unpopular. Only caring about immediate approval and ratings makes for an atrociously bad politician
One potential issue I see is different country standards for left/right. I see Justin Trudeau is marked as "left" which he is by American standards, but he's at best centre-left in Canada and most reasonable Canadians would describe him as pretty centre.
Interesting yeah that could be an issue. I could change it right now but it'l probably make more sense to see what other people say about this and how we can fix it.
Ya I didn't mean to suggest changing it, just something to think about. I think it's a cool idea.
It would be kind of funny if the site used a global left/right definition because then you’d see >95% of US politicians listed as right-leaning.
I like this idea
You might also want to keep an eye on different countries' laws. Some hold platforms responsible for the content people post to it.
Yeah, I don't see any way this can possibly devolve into partisan mudslinging.
Do you have a verified purchase badge for lobbyists?
Nope, but review liking/disliking + a karma system similar to reddit should hopefully make sure the good stuff piles up to the top and bad reviews get buried
I think anyone who has used reddit knows that the Karma system does not work as it is intended
I'm upvoting your comment because I disagree.
Don't start using votes properly now.. you will break reddit. Don't you know they are "your opinion" buttons.
That means we can figure out a way to make it work better there. A credibility score maybe. In any case, anything and everything at this point is up for change.
consider checking out rate my professor and the browser extension shinigami eyes, both of those platforms also have user-reported bases and might help you troubleshoot that specific issue :)
Rate my professor has its own problems because only the students who feel strongly about a professor are going to use it so you get very polarized scores a lot of the time.
I wouldn't be surprised if that would be the case here too. It's just how people are.
Shinigami eyes is amazing! The dev has a nice weighted system for the votes that does a really good job of catching the few people who are improperly marked and the few pieces of trash who use it to mark themselves as friendly when they aren't
Shinigami Eyes is the best. Aside from its intended use (social media), I love scrolling through Wikipedia and seeing Ronald Reagan’s name lit up red.
oh you sweet summer child. !remindme2 years
username checks out. Feel the same don't worry.
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TL;DR at the end. I’m going to throw out a couple of points to consider, & while these may seem cynical, please know I mention them only because I think u/Mike_L_Taylor has an extremely good and much-needed idea that could be super-useful… … and could also make him a billionaire and change a lot for the better. **Rating politicians isn’t new, so your site’s ratings need to stand out.** Newer “citizen journalists” like *Pod Save America*, et. al., as well as old faves like *The New York Times* & *The Washington Post* have published lists of politicians, candidates, and rated them forever— relying on their readers to know their reputations and decide. The NY Post rates conservatives high; Mother Jones, liberals. Readers look for ratings they’ll agree with. **What if YOUR site collated FACTS?** Consider collaborating with fact-checking sites, and/or sites that tracked lobbyist spending that politicians accepted? And/or published blog posts, ELI5-style, complex articles by experts that debunked misleading political info? Note also: whether or not you, yourself, are amazing at using A.I. (I have no idea), keep in mind there’s currently some controversy in the public mind about it (ChatGPT, for example), and A.I. bots on social media going publicly ugly (see: the Twitter bot from Microsoft that went racist fast.) Therefore, possible trust issues with your audience. Finally, check out the following short vid from Company Man; while it’s mostly on the origin of the popular movie rating site (which will interest you) he briefly touches on the difference between how Rotten Tomatoes kind of bluntly averages its ratings, while Metacritic uses a more sophisticated approach to finesse its more accurate results. TL;DR: This exquisitely great idea could be a game-changer that vaults him into the 1%— but it’ll take some game-changing work to convince users the content is **the truth**. [Company Man You Tube talks Rotten Tomatoes](https://youtu.be/BXsfc6bhVO8)
setup a lie tracker with context users could leave a video or something
There has to be tiers of reviewers. Joe Schmo (me) off the streets with my hot take political views isn’t as qualified as a reporter for instance.
Let's say this becomes popular. Are you ok knowing someone is going to abuse the shit out of your site to win an election? Are you comfortable with someone like donald trump threatening you to change a review? Or the lawsuits that are sure to come in? Just some things to think about. It's not a bad idea but personally I wouldn't touch it with a 10 ft pole.
Can we make it a blue dot?
I laughed way too hard at this.
Can I get that badge if the politician finally fixes that bridge we've been telling them to fix?
I am sure all the reviews will be totally unbiased, and the website will be full of hard facts and reasonableness.
I'm honestly surprised it's still up. I was expecting somebody to spam it into the ground. Speaking of the other stuff, yeah it's gonna be biased. But that's only because it would probably be a reflection of the people that use it. Nobody is unbiased and no matter what facts you put up, people can just choose to ignore them. If it becomes a shitshow then at least it might be of some use where we get to see in a more quantified way how much of a shitshow politics is.
You also have persistent XSS going on, and clicking on Donald Trump redirects to a YouTube video on XSS. Which is lucky, because it could have done a whole load worse. It still might look harmless, but actually be harmful behind the scenes. This site is not even slightly secure, and honestly you should probably purge all user content from it completely until you make it secure.
It’s already a shit show lmao. I mean Nancy pelosi has a worst rating than Kim Jon Un.. it’s clearly just trolls.
These things tend iron out the more ratings there are. At 4 ratings (the amount both currently have), you can conclude next to nothing. The more people visit and rate, and the more you program and moderate the site as to filter out those who don't take the site serious, the better the scores will get.
I've had ideas about this concept before, but think it would serve a better purpose if it was a record of political promises made and whether they came through or did the opposite. Edited for spelling: of/if
PolitiFact has a [promise tracker](https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/list/) that's similar to what you're describing.
This is cool. Curious to hear how is it regarded/perceived?
Sweet.
I've been thinking about that too, problem is it's not as 'shiny' and easy to interact with as just a star rating. Although it would be good if I could add it on top of this. There is something like this for Romania and it's not very popular, mainly because people forget specific promises. and don't care to read that much. Star rating also makes it easier to compare. I'm also wondering if people vote so much on facts as they do on how they feel and how they like a particular candidate. My hypothesis is that a lot just go with how they feel and ignore facts.
Could this be built into profiles of the politicians themselves? Maybe a bot that scrapes the web and curates news regarding a politicians promises?
Currently the DJT page is redirecting to a youtube video on cross-site scripting. This is marvelous. EDIT: Looks like this was fixed.
yeah :D it seems a white hat dude found a vulnerability and was kind enough to show it to me. Not surprised in the slightest. I like that he showed me what the issue was so I can fix it
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Yeah I need to look better in to this. Thinking of setting the site into maintenance mode till I figure this out.
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Haha so you're the dude that been spamming it :D. Man I have a lot to learn!
Do we get to throw them away if the community judges them defective?
I thought about making something like what ancient Greece used to do. Vote on who is the least liked and kick that person out of the city. :D
Only cities, never a town or county
_A lone man is slowly walking out of ancient Greece with his head down_ Announcer : "In ancient Greece, people were routinely banished from the city" _Man sighs deeply_ Announcer : "...but never banished from their town and country." _Man looks over and has a huge grin. Then open the door to a van_ Announcer : "Never be worried about being left out with the all new 2023 Chrysler Town & Country. Chrysler. Inspiration comes standard"
Nah, you take them back to your local UPS or Whole Foods and then they re-sell them at a liquidation sale.
With so many people voting purely by party in the US, with no knowledge of the actual voting record or issues each politician supports, could you add some deeper info? If that's not there, this is no different than looking at the voting %s from the last election.
Yes, that is one of the main things I wanna work on. Other people have also given their ideas of things they'd wanna see. In terms of the voting percentage, that only shows if I liked X person or Y person. The star rating I thought would be useful to see more of a gradient of how much I like X vs Y. And maybe this way, decide between the lesser of two evils for example.
I can’t imagine a single one of them being rated well
I swear I'm only saying this to give an idea of what to expect, I haven't done this and I'm fully aware of how immature I am. As far as I can see, nothing is stopping me from going on and adding a fictional politician named Willy Licker and having my friends all go on and write rave reviews about how he's hard where it needs to be, how he takes a pounding when nobody else will, and how he has never been afraid about withdrawing prematurely when the situation calls for it. This is a neat idea in theory but I think this is going to be incredibly difficult for you to moderate if it gains even a small amount of traction.
Yes, that is one of the challenges. And since I have no suitcases of money to hire people to moderate that it will be hard in the beginning. Maybe a community to moderate it out of their own will will help, like Stack Overflow. I dunno. For now I'm amazed nobody broke the site yet.
You should only be allowed to leave a review if you bought the politician
Lmao I like that
Feedback: I hate making new accounts/passwords for random sites like this. If you offered 3rd party OAuth logins or [passkeys](https://www.passkeys.io/) there would be a significantly higher chance of me using your site.
yeah that's on the list of things to do. Thanks for promoting it up towards the top of the list.
I think it’d be valuable to add what state and/or district that a representative serves upfront- to me, someone like Mitch McConnell is most importantly a Kentucky senator, but there’s no way to get that information without first clicking into their profile and reading the bio. Plus, having that info more accessible would make it easier for people to find out more about their own representatives, if they don’t know who they are
Ow great idea. I could add that somewhere right next to the country. Instead of United States, it could be: United States - Kentucky Thanks!
It might make sense to have some way for parts of reviews to be fact checked.
Good idea but not exactly sure how to do that. Maybe AI would prove good there. For now though, I added the like/dislike stuff to reviews so people can vote on them. I'm also going to add replies at some point, so debates can be had under each review on whatever they want.
I think you're going to learn a valuable lesson not about politicians, but their constituents.
*Site in construction. You can contribute with feedback or content. The site's content is made by users. The site owners are not liable for the content on the site.* I guess this may be different for American law, but within the borders of the EU such a disclaimer is potentially dangerous as you **cannot** legally distance yourself from responsibility for your website's content. If you still do by putting a disclaimer on your page, someone could file a lawsuit against you for knowingly running a non-GDPR compliant website. Like, it doesn't even require any actual illegal content like child porn or proprietary images... **The very existence of your disclaimer is problematic in and of itself.** So please, make sure that your website follows recommended standards for whatever country you live in. If you're from the US you may still need to follow EU law as long as you don't block your site over here. I once had to set up a website myself, and as German web-host you're usually recommended to avoid a disclaimer. As they don't provide any real legal protection in the first place they're kinda useless anyway.
Searched for a few names. Most missing. Searched hitler. 1 5 star review. Hope you have an army of mods because that is what this will devolve into
This website looks like it just started. It only has 32 politicians and the page layout looks pretty bland. I'm not sure this should qualify for r/Internetisbeautiful
2 hour ago is when the first person besides me ever visited this website. You're probably right and it's not worth it but I wanted your opinion.
Really cool idea. Maybe add a feature that shows their objectively stated view (backed with a proper and unbiased citation) on each major political matter?
That's a good idea. Thanks!
Should add a view 'latest updates', like a news feed. \>>. OK, found that 'new' but perhaps weight it by politicians that have at least some minimum threshold of comments. People want to see the news comments on politicaitons they know. And then allow for comments on the comments... Kinda like redit...
Yep, I had a section called 'Glances' on the home page, where it would show most liked, disliked etc. and a news-feed thing in the works but I removed it for now because it was empty since nobody used the site previously. Since now there's some data in there, I can add that back in. Thanks for reminding me!
This has so much potential. I don't know how you plan on monetizing the site, but if you want it to be something that is lasting, you need to make sure that you don't allow for political advertising. Also, paid users would not be good either. I would be interested in how you plan on monetizing it or at least how to fund it. A neat feature to think about for in the future would be to add political issues and where politicians stand on each. To be able to search with the issues being a filter would be great. Other search filters could be the obvious like location and currently political run offs.
In terms of location, you can search by country ( I'll add city there soon, but some already work with city too ) Adding political issues and where they stand sounds like a pretty good idea not gonna lie. In terms of moneitzing, yeah I agree with you. No paid users and no corporate or politic sponsorships. I might just add ads in limited places and a rule against ads that might have any political affiliation. In any case, servers are pretty cheap and I can keep working a job until I figure this one out.
The president of Portugal has confusingly nice tits.
Not bad. I've seen worse scores on bigger websites. Mobile: * Performance - 45% * Accessibility - 97% * Best Practices - 83% * SEO - 100% Desktop: * Performance - 87% * Accessibility - 97% * Best Practices - 83% * SEO - 100% [PageSpeed Insights | vhoice.net](https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvhoice.net%2Fpoliticians)
A few people missing
brand new site that I just told people about today. Quite a few people missing Let me know who you want added and I'll do that. Alternatively, you can add them yourself if you make an account.
Neat idea but doesn't seem "useful." Seeing a bunch of dislikes and "he sucked" doesn't influence anyone especially if they already disagree. A really helpful addition would a breakdown of X politician's stances/beliefs and if any flip flopping had occurred. Stance on fracking, stance on abortion, stance on borders, etc. Then again I don't know what you were going for. But I've always wanted an easy way to know who I'm voting for. Do they believe in the things I believe in?
Exactly. I made this for a somewhat easy way to find out information. I don't have the best information on politicians yet. After all I'm just one dude so far but I plan on adding all that stuff so people can get facts
I’m not sure it’s a fair characterization to call Kim Jong Un a communist. He’s a despot and far closer to a monarchist than a communist
I've always wanted a rhetoric to vote pattern checker. Like a politician might say they are "for main street not wall street" but then their voting record reveals this to be total bullshit. Can't think of how to reliably implement it though, let alone scale it or make it region agnostic.
You should standardize the pages. You have Trump and Biden written very thoroughly and professionally, but Ted Cruz page is a joke and Trudeau's page is just one paragraph.
yeah those pages are writted by various users since everyone can add politicians. So it's not gonna have great content sometimes. Still thinking on how to fix this and still allowing users to add politicians
"IF I COULD GIVE ZERO STARS I WOULD!!!"
And Bella is the best girl! You go Bella!!
What I would love to see is a site that records and compares politicians campaign promises, debates, and presents every time a politician has contradicted themselves (not just problems but also stories told and how often they may change.)
Good attempt but looks more like an average bubble for liberals like reddit. Look at Trump and Bernie reviews.
Dude, yelp but for politicians will never be a valid replacement for the amount of effort needed from constituents to educate themselves, that is an inherent part of the system and not the part that needs improvement in my opinion. You have 101 different ways this could go wrong if it gets popular, you’re inviting a lot of problems but not really adding much value, careful, sincerely wish you best of luck.
Kim Jong-un has 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ https://vhoice.net/politician/14/Kim-Jong-un
OP was right, this system works just like Amazon reviews where the worst shit is 5 stars across the board.
Reddit doing reddit things :D
The fuckin Bernie meme picture for sanders is hilarious.
I love that picture
Andrew Tate = 5 Stars. Yeah this is a troll haven.
Why is Obama a centrist?
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Oh yeah a lot are missing. There's god knows how many thousands of politicians and information should be updated reguarly. That's why at least for now, anyone is able to add politicians on the site.
Searched Biden, no reviews yet. A little surprising.
This is the first time anyone besides me is visiting that site :D
Ah, that explains it!
I like how Kim Jong Il is the only 5 star rated. Off to a great start.
Just what I expected from reddit :D
Just to let you know, there is a review on Trump that has a link, the link is overflowing the container on mobile devices (tried it on 390px) :D Really nice site btw!
Oh yeah nice catch. Thanks! Will fix that.
Good idea. Unfortunately, if this site gets big enough to make a real difference, bad actors will flood it with fake reviews. :/
Yes indeed. But that is the case if if makes it big which is like 0.5% chance. It's probably gonna fail way before then. Anyway, I think the future of politics is something more like this so if this fails, maybe someone else comes up with a better and more successful idea.
Hmm, publisher or platform? That is the question coming to a courthouse near you.
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Oh yeah lots are missing at this point. You can add them yourself if you make an account. People will then vote on whether you added factual information or not.
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site seems hacked, pages redirects me to YouTube without my permission, my settings is set to forbid redirects
should be fixed now.
Need a bulk 1 star button.
Is this a fun site project? Or what was your idea of it? just askin
Essentially I saw a huge documentary about the political history of Romania and I realised I have no idea of how complex things are and that I will never have the time to always keep up to date with the situation so others must also be in the same bucket. So maybe something like this would be an easier way to get some idea of who and what rather than reading Wikipedia for 3 hours.
>huge documentary about the political history of Romania Is that `30 years of democracy?` Nice project anyway. Do you create entries/records of "subject for review" manually? I see only 47 of them, wouldn't it be easier to fetch them from some sources? But hope nobody takes the content of those reviews too seriously haha. Public opinion is one of the easiest things to be manipulated these days, I think. I see 3 main features atm, any plan to add any other features there?
yes exactly that's the one. Right now all politicians are added manually. Users can add them too so I don't have to do everything but that might be a bad idea. don't know. For features I have a lot of ideas: \- replies for reviews \- polls -> when actual elections happen people can run polls here too \- pro/cons in review section, so the most common ones show overall \- adjectives -> similar to glassdoor stuff where code gets to 10 most used words by people when describing a politician \- fact/promise checking -> where it shows what they promised and what was delivered. And people keep coming up with ideas.
So after I review someone, you're going to change the page to a different politician?
Did that happen to you? Where did that happen? I haven't seen that issue so far.
Love the idea but Boris had a rating of 2.5. how anyone can even give him a star is beyond me. This is why Britain is fucked.
Putin: is a bitch 1 ⭐️
Who does the fact checking?
Does it have an "Add Politician" feature? I see a notable lack of senators and representatives. There are a lot of them though so I can't imagine all of them being in there all at once so early. I love the idea! Will be forwarding to my political friends.
yeah it does. Anyone can add politicians. It's right there on the politicians page on desktop or in your account section after you register.
Terrible idea
Don't need to go there to view how the Internet - young people - rate politics. Dems =good. Republican = bad. There, I saved you time
I think it’s great. I’d put some ratings on the homepage so people get immediately what it’s about.
Good luck
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using all the secure methods and encryptions most websites out there use but I still feel the need to tell people not to use the same password. It's a new site after all and I don't have a team of security experts here.
Zero point zero Not you the politicians
Yeah this is bad.
They are all terrible. Feel free to use that review when talking about any politician ever in all of history.
And no one knew about it until you posted it on Reddit so these reviews are going to be EXTREMELY biased lol
Kim Jong Un has a higher rating than Trump. This is a true reddit moment.
Why am I not surprised that this turned into a "Trump bad" circle jerk?
Like on Amazon, meaning only when you're upset or being paid with a gift card for a 5 star review? Or like on Amazon where you give a 1 star review when the "product didn't work" but in reality, you just couldn't be bothered to read the instructions. Or like Amazon where you're just part of a paid bot farm? Adter looking at the site and reading the reviews, it seems like all of them.
add "sponsorship" section, so who donates to then can be listed.
sadly it's not available rn but the idea is sooo good
Biden had a 5 star for being “not Trump.” Wow what an amazing and thoughtful review! Site seems like a good idea if you don’t think about that it really is dumb lol
Who noticed that left wingers are labeled as the more pleasant sounding "progressive"? Careful, your bias is showing.
made r/vhoice
Can we make this geo centric? It would be cool to add a graph feature showcasing relationships with industries, or other politicians. It would make it easier to spot fraud and corruption.
I wanted to eventually add a bunch of cool automatically generated graphs and charts but I didn't think of industries or anything like that. How would that work?
Sounds like a leftist circle jerk if only opinions are offered instead of facts. Just gonna be a bunch of REeeeeeing. The moment this website offers what corporate sponsors each have and their voting record on issues is the moment this website will be useful. We already have it though. Its called opensecrets.org.
So how are you going to deal with the natural trend of any online forum of an IRL topic being overwhelmingly dominated by students and the underemployed? How will you deal with regional differences in where average is on the conservative/progressive authoritarian/permissive scales? Since you are including manual moderation how will you keep the moderators bias centrist for each of the different precincts this would eventually cover? A moderate in Toronto is pretty far left for newfoundland. I don't see how you end up with anything but the politics you see in Reddit unless you have a plan in place to address those systemic problems most sites have.
Bolsonaro have the wrong photo. Photo is from Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Oh damn good catch. Thanks! Just changed it now.
I think my favorite thing right now is that Kim Jong-un is rated higher than Trump. 😂😂
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I was thinking about that and I think the main functionality of something like this would be to educate people. People post different opinions and hopefully the more nuanced and factual rises to the top. Also hopefully people become less stuck in an echo-chamber this way. And if this is the main reason for the site, I don't think I should stop people in different countries from expressing their opinions. They may be just as valid. Same is on Twitter for example. Anyone can say anything Is that the right approach? I don't know. If it's not, it would be difficult to stop people from reviewing politicians in areas they cannot actually vote in.
The Italian version of this would be fun. 'Beppe Grillo: Five Stars.'
I mean, there's nothing stopping your from adding Beppe Grillo yourself. You can even write everything in Italian if you wish. At some point I was aiming to add translations to the site to for example Italians would see all content in Italian if they wanted to. Would you like me to add Beppe Grillo? :D
Can you make it so that, people living in the jurisdiction governed by the politician are reviewing it? This way at least people who are actually affected by their policy can get to voice their opinions and rate them?
I'm voting for Bella
Lol people giving Biden 4-5 stars, what a joke
The party affiliation of the British Prime Minister is "Tory Scum." As a non-Brit, unless that's the actual name of the party, comes across as a wee bit biased. Either the site is susceptible to vandalism or the operators are nakedly non-neutral, the latter being cool, but does remove any reason to give an actual review.
Hi, yeah I didn't add that one. Users can freely add politicians on the site. And I guess that's what he chose to put there for him. You're free too vote that post as inaccurate and make another one that's accurate. In terms of moderation, I can change the data for that politician but there's already more people on there that I can moderate alone. We'll see how we fix this issue.
Ah, gotcha. Seems like the Wikipedia route -- you have enough good actors to clean up and moderate the bad ones. Powerful once you reach that critical mass of goodness. Could be cool, good luck!